Client Evaluation of Treatment for Alcohol Use Disorder in COMBINE

Practitioners and researchers across disciplines have been interested in identifying variables that act as indicators of treatment success or failure and one straightforward approach to measuring treatment success is to assess client satisfaction with treatment. Existing measures of treatment satisfaction do not address the specific aspects relevant to alcohol use disorder (AUD) treatment. Researchers in the COMBINE Study developed a new measure of treatment satisfaction to assess satisfaction in AUD treatment: The Evaluation of Treatment (EOT) measure. The aims of the present study were to examine the factor structure of items from the EOT measure and to examine the association between the EOT measure and other measures of client engagement, as well as AUD treatment outcomes. We also extended the model to test for possible mediation effects of treatment evaluation on the relationship between client treatment engagement components and AUD treatment outcomes. Confirmatory factor analyses indicated a 6-factor model with a higher order treatment satisfaction factor provided an excellent fit to the data (χ2 (246)=499.44, p<0.001, CFI=0.99, TLI=0.98, RMSEA =0.040 (90% CI: 0.035, 0.045). Overall, the latent factor of treatment satisfaction was significantly associated with client engagement predictors and treatment evaluation significantly mediated the associations between both working alliance and treatment expectations in the prediction of alcohol-related problems and global severity. Findings suggest that client evaluations of treatment play a substantial role in predicting AUD treatment outcomes and should be considered in future treatment and research.